by J L Aarne
“I could always almost do it for myself,” Travis says. “Nothing the damn machine could do about it either. It can’t do anything about what you think. Vaughn didn’t give it that at least.”
Aarom jumps, startled to hear him speak. They don’t talk while it’s happening. They never talk while it’s happening.
“Almost,” Travis says. “But I need your help to get there.”
“Shh,” Aarom admonishes. “Watch. Feel it. It only happens once.”
Travis chuffs a soft laugh. “Guess that’s true,” he says.
Then he’s quiet and Aarom begins to speak. It doesn’t take long. His story is longer than most, but shorter than some. There is a two year grace period between the day the Destiny Machine is not turned on and the day the first bombs drop close enough to Travis’s hometown in Kentucky to wipe out life in that state. It also wipes out a significant portion of life in Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee and Virginia, but little Travis is only nine years old; old enough to know there are such places, but too young to have ever seen them.
In the two years before the bomb, his family is scared a lot. His dad is always shouting at his mom and Mom has stopped trying to fight back. It’s all politics and the weather and crap on the news that he doesn’t care about, but it really upsets them. They blame the president. Travis doesn’t know much about the president, except that he seems like a nice guy and he’s not as old as most of the presidents who came before him.
There are freak storms and Travis knows a little more about that because sometimes that is interesting even to a kid. States along the coast get it the worst. Hurricanes out of season, unseasonably cold or hot weather all through the year, rising water. A tsunami bigger than anything anyone has ever seen before hits Manhattan and kills over a hundred thousand people. The rest have to leave and the city, what is left of it, sinks beneath the ocean. Travis wants to be a storm-chaser, but because his parents are so angry all the time and it makes him uneasy, he tells his mom he wants to be a meteorologist. She still says, in her quiet, ironic voice, that it’s a good choice because these days he can sit back and let the weather come to him.
It’s the middle of the night when the neutron bomb falls somewhere near Louisville. Travis and his parents are all sleeping. They don’t wake. They die as they’re dreaming and don’t feel a thing; they just don’t wake up.
Aarom has to pry his hand free from Travis’s when it’s over. Travis looks like he’s sleeping on the sofa beside him, but he’s dead. Aarom stares at him for a minute before he gets up, takes the other hit of sunshine, the lancet syringe and tourniquet and walks through the house in search of the bedroom.
The underground apartment is surprisingly nice and spacious. However, it is very clear that Travis lived in it alone. There are no soft colors or edges to the furniture, no women’s clothing in the hampers or closet and no scented soaps or creams in the bathroom. There’s a VR window on the far wall with a view from on high of old world New York City at night. It’s pretty, but distracting to Aarom, so he changes it. He tries a forest glade, but the animal sounds of birds and squirrels will wake him and he knows it. He settles on an ocean with craggy rocks stabbing at the sky, programs it to night with a full moon and turns the volume down to a tolerable level.
Sitting on the side of the bed with the ocean view, Aarom ties off his arm the way Travis did his, the way he’s seen shine junkies do it a hundred times. He usually reserves his drug use for the dens and has never done it this way before, but he’s heard it’s even better. Of course, he keeps in mind that it is junkies who have told him so. He fills the syringe, then he has to spend a few seconds searching for a vein. When he finds it, he hits the plunger button and the hit is like an electric shock. The sunshine snaps through his body, makes it come alive and tingle. Staring at the water pounding on the rocks, it feels like his skin and hair is wet, though he knows it can’t be.
For some reason, he hears Sabra’s voice as he reclines back on the bed.
We know everything and it has not made us happy.
He laughs softly. They don’t know everything. Sabra probably knows more than Aarom, but he doesn’t know everything. Sonja definitely doesn’t know everything. Aarom is not arrogant enough to even pretend he knows everything. If they knew everything, the world wouldn’t be so fucked up. They didn’t know before the machine was turned on and it doesn’t seem like the machine has changed the status quo in that regard. The difference is that now they are that much more helpless to learn.
Why is he thinking about this anyway? Travis? He didn’t know Travis at all. Not until the end, but even at the end, it’s all visions of a person he’s never known. Maybe it’s because he liked him. Aarom has often been accused of not understanding people, but that’s just not the case; he understands them and he doesn’t like them very much.
Life can sometimes be a terrible thing to happen to a person.
Sabra’s voice again. Aarom growls a curse under his breath and turns his head on the pillow to watch the waves beating on the rocks. The sunshine is warm loving fingers on his brain and the irritation quickly fades away. The drug is all beauty and joy; the intrusion of Aarom’s own dark thoughts can only go so far, only last so long before they’re flushed away.
Out on the beach beneath the full moon, a figure strides across the sand. A big dog bounds ahead and Aarom knows it’s Jonathan. Jonathan and one of the golden retrievers. He would know Jonathan’s movements and gestures anywhere at twice the distance. Both figures leave footprints in the wet sand as they go. The water comes in, bubbles around their feet, and their trail is washed away. It must be a vision or a dream because Buttercup and Bart have both been dead since Jonathan and Aarom were in high school and Jonathan walking on the beach is the Jonathan of now. Jonathan picks up a stick of driftwood and the dog barks and dances eagerly for him to throw it.
We are living in the last days! the raving man named Matthew screams in his mind.
Out on the beach, Jonathan turns his head to look for the source of the sound. The dog snatches the stick from his hand and darts down the beach with it, one side dragging in the sand.
“Shut up,” Aarom whispers, swatting his own forehead like it will jostle Sabra and Matthew into silence. “Stop it. Not now.”
You’re shy, Jonathan says.
Aarom opens his eyes and turns toward the VR window, but Jonathan’s not there anymore. The voice is closer. He feels a hand on the back of his shoulder and turns to find him there. He’s sitting with him on the bed. One leg is drawn up and his foot is wet and crusted with sand. He smiles and light from the VR moon catches in his eyes. Eyes the same color of blue the sky was when they were younger. There is a reflection of nighttime ocean waves in his eyes that has Aarom looking at him in wonder. It’s the drug. He knows it’s the drug, but the waves, that’s a detail that gives him pause.
You’re shy, Jonathan says again. I know.
“I’m sorry,” Aarom says. He doesn’t know which thing he’s sorry for. A little bit of everything maybe.
Not now, Jonathan says. Tell me later. Tell me about all of it and say it again later.
Dreams and visions while high on shine are like real dreams in many ways. They tap into the subconscious. Jonathan is only telling him what he’s thinking. Still, it helps to hear it in his voice.
“I love you,” Aarom says. He says it barely above a whisper. It’s a secret he’s kept for most of his life. He has never even said it to Jonathan when he’s dreaming. It hurts less than he has imagined—and more. “I am so in love with you.”
And that’s okay, Jonathan says. He stretches out on the bed beside him propped up on one elbow and smiles at him. A real smile that reaches his eyes like they used to. What are you so afraid of?
“Nothing,” Aarom says. “Everything.”
Jonathan brushes a lock of dark hair back from Aarom’s face and he can feel his fingertips on his brow. He can smell the saltwater on his skin faintly and a lingering odor
of dog. It’s so vivid.
Sleep, Jonathan tells him. It’s getting late—or early. Late by your clock. The sun’s up by now. You look like hell. Go to sleep. I’ll still be here when you wake up.
But he won’t be. Aarom knows he won’t be because as soon as the shine wears off, he’ll be alone. Alone in Travis’s apartment with Travis’s corpse. He doesn’t tell Jonathan this; Jonathan undoubtedly knows. Jonathan is a creation of his tired, intoxicated mind, so he knows what Aarom knows. And he knows how much Aarom wants to hear him say such things. Such ordinary things.
“Okay,” Aarom says.
He doesn’t close his eyes and finally Jonathan puts a finger over both of his eyelids and pushes them down. He laughs. Aarom can feel his fingertips pressing there above his eyelashes. Then they’re gone and he falls asleep. It’s like drifting beneath the dark, smoky waves of the ocean, pulled inexorably down with the undertow. He thinks he feels Jonathan’s fingers petting through his hair before he’s lost to it, but he can’t be sure and it’s all fantasy and dreams anyway.
7.
Nights are still busy for Aarom for a while after Travis. It’s his excuse to himself when he needs one for why he doesn’t go see Jonathan and fix things between them. Sometimes he thinks about that day and what Jonathan said to him, how one day Aarom will just stop coming by and that’ll be the end, and it makes him feel like a piece of shit because he never meant to do that to Jonathan, and he still won’t allow himself to believe it’s what he’s doing, but isn’t it? No, he tells himself, he’s just busy. Too busy and too tired to use up the few hours he has for sleep to visit Jonathan, and probably get into another fight about something he has no control over. He even knows that he’s being a coward about it, but he’s always been a little bit of a coward where Jonathan is concerned.
It’s late and Aarom is heading back into the sprawl on the sidewalk near the underpass he goes through when he visits his mother when a shadow separates itself from a narrow gap between two buildings and lopes toward him. Aarom doesn’t think anything of it. He’s not afraid or even that alarmed by it. There is no violent crime anymore. There is no assault. There is no rape. There is no murder. The machine protects them all from it. A person with such predilections finds themselves essentially castrated. The only ones who are free to kill are prophets, but there are no other prophets working in Aarom’s district tonight.
He glances at the figure as it draws almost even with him. It’s a man and he’s wearing a hooded sweater or jacket. He laughs to himself about something and Aarom expects him to move on, but he doesn’t. He falls into step with him, walking on the street only a couple of feet from Aarom on the sidewalk, keeping pace with him.
“What do you want?” Aarom finally asks.
“A word,” the man says. “Just a word. A word is all. A word and nothing more. Words, words, words, Aarom. Aarom. What a silly name.”
“Yeah, well, my mother gave it to me. I’m rather partial to it,” Aarom says.
Here is yet another guy he doesn’t know who knows his name. He wonders if this man is also psychic like Travis or if Aarom’s name has been posted somewhere on a service announcement poster, in the newspaper or on one of the many crime websites. If so, it worries him to think where they might have gotten it from. He’s supposed to be dead and he’s done everything he can to make sure he stays that way.
“We know each other of old,” the man says.
Aarom frowns and squints to see through the shadows beneath the man’s hood. “I know you,” he says.
“Yes! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you!” the man abruptly shouts.
“Shut up,” Aarom hisses, looking around uneasily. There aren’t many apartments along this little strip of road and no houses, but shouting and screaming can alert the sentinels—if there are any left in the area—which will alert the police. “Shh, okay? Be quiet. Your name’s Matthew. I met you… about a week ago. Out here.”
“You know me better than that,” Matthew insists. He reaches for Aarom, but Aarom steps back and moves his hands and arms out of his reach. “We have shared a fire. We have… Let me show you!”
He’s quick and he’s strong. Quicker and stronger than Aarom for just a second and he catches him by the wrist. His grip is painful and Aarom tries to tear away, but then he stops feeling it and his mind floods with images. It is exactly like what he sees when he reaps a supplicant. It’s a story. It’s his story but it’s in pieces like a stack of old photographs dumped out on the floor.
A man in rags cornered by a pack of dogs. Aarom with something sharp. Some kind of knife or machete. And fire. The dogs are afraid of fire. More fire, but they’re sitting together around it. They talk. Matthew tells him his name. Aarom shares what food he has with him and a blanket. They bed down on a layer of dirt spread over the hot coals of the fire to stay warm. In the morning, Matthew is gone and so is the blanket.
That’s all there is. It feels like there should be more, but Aarom has palmed his sickle knife from his pocket. He slips his fingers into the holes in the hilt that fit him so perfectly and lashes out. The blade draws energy from his body to heat, so it’s still cold when it cuts Matthew’s arm. Aarom is nearly as surprised as Matthew at the sight of his blood.
“What do you want from me?” Aarom asks.
“You are a witness,” Matthew says, cradling his injured arm to his chest. “And I will give power unto my two witnesses, and they shall prophesy a thousand two hundred and threescore days, clothed in sackcloth.”
Aarom backs away from him. Matthew doesn’t follow, but Aarom doesn’t put his knife away just yet. The man is crazy and unpredictable and he doesn’t have a chip, so he is dangerous. He stays by the sidewalk and watches Aarom back away without pursuing him, but his voice rises and follows Aarom away until he’s screaming biblical verses about the holy witnesses after him and Aarom is nearly too far away to hear it. He only turns around when he can no longer see Matthew. Then he hurries on his way and starts toward home.
“These have power to shut heaven! And power over the rivers to turn them to blood! And to smite the earth with plague!”
Aarom only understands what he is screaming by then because he has read it in the book himself. Distance has mutated his words into something closer to the howling of wind. He doesn’t know why Matthew is so fixated on him or on that particular chapter of religious text, but he wants nothing to do with either. If he knew him in another life, he has forgotten it and he’s glad. Aarom isn’t special and he certainly isn’t one of the horrid monsters the witnesses have always seemed to be in the Bible. He is going to have to figure out a way to go around that underpass on his rounds at night and when he goes to see his mother in the morning.
8.
As suddenly as the flood of supplicants came upon them, it passes and everything goes back to normal. Aarom answers only one summons a night, sometimes two, but it’s usually only one. As before, there are the rare nights when he wanders the streets and never sees a flag at all.
He visits Iniquity twice, once on Tuesday and again on Friday. It doesn’t do for him what it used to anymore. He unplugs and still feels just as restless and hopeless as ever and the feeling lasts and follows him home.
When he first had his port installed and VR was new to him, Aarom had tried all the things everybody tries: He skydived, climbed mountains, he drove a car at two hundred miles an hour through Tokyo, went swimming in shark infested waters, he was a gangster in 1925, a firefighter in New York in September 2001, a U.S. soldier in Vietnam in 1970. He must have died fifty times at least. It never felt right—the dying—and he’s sure that’s because death is a matter of perception, a concept that changes with individual belief. Sometimes it was frightening, sometimes it was peaceful, which said more about the programmer than it did about death. It lost its charm very quickly and soon he was revisiting his own life, paying extra credits for programs customized to his own memories. Doing it over and doing it right. A hundred times if he
wanted to.
Now he worries that it’s never going to be enough for him again. His own memories don’t satisfy him anymore. They’re going the way of car crashes and earthquakes. He’s numb to it and distracted, and when he’s plugged in sometimes he’s not content to relive things.
At one point, he loses his temper and screams at Jonathan in frustration. Jonathan, who has been synthesized from Aarom’s own mind, created out of his knowledge and perception of Jonathan and represents an ideal almost more than a person. Few things can disrupt and destroy the dream after plugging in, but challenging the reality of it can shake things up. Jonathan as Delilah Rosewood programmed him does not know how to react to Aarom’s outburst. He becomes concerned at first, but when Aarom doesn’t respond to it, he stops that too and merely stands there while Aarom rages at him.
Aarom unplugs early after that. He leaves Jonathan standing in the living room of the apartment Aarom had when he was in college, stalks to the table in the kitchen where he finds a bowl of apples. He picks up the one on top of the pile, a bright red fruit, takes a bite and he opens his eyes. Stares at YOU ARE HERE screaming at him in red letters a foot high and he’s ashamed of himself and stupidly feels like crying.
He leaves and walks home, taking a longer route, going out of his way to pass down Jonathan’s street. Aarom usually visits the dens after the sun comes up and stays until evening, so it’s late in the day when he goes by his house, but Jonathan isn’t home. This bothers him and he considers waiting for him, but then he doesn’t because he still doesn’t know what to say to him. He should apologize and he tells himself he will, but it feels so useless. If he’s sorry about it, it still doesn’t change the way things are or the way things have to stay between them, and that’s just the sort of thing Jonathan would call him out on.
